A Twitter oral history of the Instant Pot

For the past year or more it has been the talk of the kitchen: The Instant Pot. But where did it come from? Why does everyone you know suddenly have one? How do they work?

To attempt to answer these questions (and likely raise more) we turned to the wise sage of our time, Twitter, using the oracle better known as Echo.

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A brief history of the Instant Pot

If you’re completely lost on what an Instant Pot is, here’s some light background reading for you from NPR; it sums up how Instant Pots- which have been around for years- gained popularity through social media word-of-mouth marketing over the second half of 2016, through 2017 and now into 2018.

They’re not the only game in town, but they are top-of-mind when it comes to convenient kitchen multi-taskers.

“While kitchen appliance giants such as Cuisinart, Breville and Fagor also produce electric pressure cookers, Pazzaglia praises the Instant Pot’s convenient features, particularly the stainless steel inner pot. Of course, a catchy name doesn’t hurt either. ‘Like Kleenex came to represent tissues and Xerox photocopiers, Instant Pot is coming to represent electric pressure multi-cookers,’ says Pazzaglia. ‘It’s both corny and fun and doesn’t come with any of the hang-ups and historical fear that the words ‘pressure cooker’ bring about.’”

So there’s your brief history from NPR circa 2017. We dove into the Twitter archives to see what else we could find.

A brief history of the Instant Pot according to Twitter

It’s always interesting to track the history of something via Twitter. Looking at mentions of “instant pot” between mid-2016 and mid-2017, you can see spikes around Black Friday and some other holidays (like just before Father’s Day):

Notable tweets include people discussing holiday deals:

Amazon has the Instant Pot on sale for $49. My #1 kitchen appliance & one I highly rec, esp. at this price! https://t.co/ybXQ6V31l0

Bloggers are still sharing recipes, “Potheads” are sharing their cooking successes, and everyone is making jokes about the cult among us that we have accepted we are living with for the foreseeable future.